Oh, Good.

I know I haven’t written in a while. I guess I haven’t felt like I had anything original to say. Not that I’ve ever had anything truly original to say, but you know what I mean. I felt like I needed to write today though, which I haven’t felt in a long time. Actually, for a long time, I’ve pretty much exclusively felt like I’m living under water. Like Ariel! Or something.

Turns out, when you’ve had some scary health issues every October/November for the past two years, it can make you kind of an anxious mess. Also, turns out that it’s pretty hard to write when you’re like that. The idea of writing again started to prickle in my brain a few weeks ago, even though I still didn’t have anything to say, or know why I wanted to say it. But this morning was a good morning, and I woke up and blow-dried my hair (I know!), and texted my best friend.

Me (7:50 a.m.): Annnndddd I’m back!

Mel (7:51 a.m): Yayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!!

Quick life update: I am healthy (you know, -ish, but still!), I still think gin tastes disgusting, I’m still a nut case, and I’m starting to own it. All of it.

See, for a little while, I’ve been letting things get to me in a very non-Me way. I didn’t feel like myself- I wasn’t- and they’ve been noticing. They being the family and friends who’ve selflessly stuck by me through the roller-coaster that the past few years have been – it’s been super fun, right?

I know what I want to say now. I want to write for them.

So, hey you, I wanted to write a friendly reminder that I love you a lot. That’s right, this blog is a love letter to you. Thanks for putting up with bad moods. Thanks for coming to doctor’s appointments and for worrying about me. Thanks for listening to me talk shit. Thanks for making me laugh. Thanks for encouraging really ill-advised behavior. Thanks for googling. Thanks for loving me back. Thanks for always forgiving me. Thanks for letting me figure out how to be how I am now and still be me how I’ve always been.

In a way, it’s also a love letter to myself. Not only cause you are all a big part of who I am, but to remind myself that it’s ok to be in a bad mood, and it’s ok to not bend over backward to be nice, and it’s ok to google (even though I personally do not recommend googling- guys, seriously, never google). It’s to remind myself, and you, that it’s okay to change, to be tougher, and sometimes more difficult; that we’re allowed to be weird; allowed to take time to figure out how who we’ve always been fits in with who we are now; and allowed to muck up the process of figuring out how to own it.

And even though I’m back–which you all noticed about three weeks before I did–still, thanks for making it easier.

My brother and I went to an SAT tutor together. He’s a year older (1 year, 3 months, and 19 days to be precise) but we ended up in the same grade in high school. Neither of us are particularly good at or fond of standardized tests because they’re boring, but he was too driven and I was too lazy to study on our own, so a tutor it was.

I remember very little about my time at SAT tutoring. I don’t even remember our tutors name. I do remember, however, that she wore polyester leopard print tops and makeup on her hands which were also heavily moisturized in sparkly glitter. Her house smelled like Playdoh, which always freaks me out, and she really liked roosters. Rooster blankets; roosters wallpaper; rooster pillows; rooster plates; rooster statues; and roosters on those towels that aren’t face cloths and aren’t hand cloths but aren’t big enough to be a bath towel (UGH! Why do they make those!)

While I found myself incredibly uncomfortable by the twin Taxidermy Roosters that flanked the doorway to her sitting room, I was more unsettled by the fact that the toilet mags were a years worth of gun catalogs, Men’s Health, and Chicken Soup for the Soul- which, who writes those? Give me their name so that I can tell them that I am still scarred by that story about Tilly the dog who just wanted you to pet her before you went to school and you ignored her!!! and then you got home to find out that Tilly the dog had been hit by a car! I cried at recess when I read that, and I’ll never live it down… just like you’ll never ever be able to pet Tilly again, you MEANIE, you should’ve pet her when you had the chance!!!!!!!

My Chicken Soup aggressions aside… there are nice things I remember, too. Mainly, the drive with my brother, who’s always been one of my favorite humans. We would drive in our shared clunker the 15 mile route over to her house in the boonies of Newtown, passing some of my favorite sites: the Flag trees, about a mile from my house in Bethel; Fairfield Hills, a hauntingly beautiful abandoned(ish) psychiatric hospital; the colors of autumn. We’d listen to Coldplay’s “The Scientist” on repeat (say what you will, it is a good song), Bob Dylan, and The White Album of the Beatles…. The musical education was probably more important than those silly tests anyway. I couldn’t have guessed then that things would be how they are now.

I drive past those old favorite spots of mine all the time, since I moved back to old Bethel town. And most of the time, I don’t notice them, but in the winter months I start to feel the heaviness of the past few years; the weight of the landmarks all of us grew up with has shifted slightly since December 14, 2012; the lives of all those little babies who were murdered senselessly, what could have been but wasn’t, what SHOULD have been but wasn’t.

Things have been hard lately, guys, and I know more than ever that I cannot be selfish – it’s not just that way for me, but it seems for everyone in our little corner of the universe: the unexpected passing of a 25-year-old lovebug; the passing of a beautiful, vibrant 22-year old girl I’ve known and loved since I can remember; the death of a 23-year-old new mother of a gorgeous 3-month old baby via hit and run; a cancer diagnosis of two beloved neighbors… Just in the last few months. Sometimes, I wonder, does this happen in other little towns? At 25, I can’t count the number of funerals I’ve been to, are we all alone in this burden? Then I find a little perspective in my Facebook feed, as my friends post more and more about their hardships or their friend’s hardships. And I am reminded not to be so self-centered. I’ve come to realize it doesn’t take away from individual pain, suffering, sadness, but rather makes me feel like I have a little purpose – to let people know “we’ve gone through this, we can help you get through this, because you CAN get through it” or at the very least “hey, I’m here if you need me, and I understand.”

So, I return to the flag trees. Painted when I was 12 years old, when towers fell and planes crashed. The flag trees have always held a special place in my heart, I’m sure I have photos somewhere of my siblings and I climbing all over them somewhere (though, as I am moving house, I can’t find any!!!) Most of the time I drive past them and forget they are there – how strange the way the landscape of home fogs over in your mind. I found these trees a comfort at 12 – old enough to understand, but not old enough to have people tell you everything; old enough to know your daddy had biweekly appointments on the 71st floor of the North Tower and luckily they weren’t on Tuesdays. I found them a comfort at 23 when twenty babies, six educators, one mother, and a severely ill young man died. To me, the trees are hope. Hope is not always a thing with feathers.

Sometimes hope is a thing that flutters like a flag, or continues to grow. Sometimes its just some paint on a couple of trees. Sometimes hope even looks like roosters and chicken soup for the soul. Sometimes hope is when you say, “I’m here if you need me.”

Growing up with an Irish father and an Irish-American mother comes with it’s perks. The greatest of these being that I’ve spent a pretty solid chunk of my life in Ireland. I always liked it a bit better. When my aunt passed away, the priest at her funeral talked about “thin places” in his homily — thin places being those places or people where the barrier between heaven and earth isn’t quite so thick. Even non-religious folk can identify with this feeling: like you’re rooted to the earth but gravity doesn’t seem so heavy (metaphorically… or something). That’s how I feel when I’m there.

Plus, everyone can pronounce my name.

Taking a three month hiatus from blogging is probably not the best way to exercise my writing muscle, but listen, I’ve been really busy doing absolutely nothing. Some things have changed in my life, one of these things being that I have a boyfriend now, which means I’ve had to pretend that I am an “adult” who doesn’t hide “feelings” behind “sarcasm.” (Lol, I know.)

I ordered him on the internet. Which is funny, because I kind of did. I joined OkCupid (for the craic) and he was the first person I messaged and the only one I actually wanted to respond. One of the stranger things about meeting someone on the internet before you meet them in person is The Introduction. Introductions are always awkward for someone like me, who has a name that isn’t easily pronounced in the English language. My screen name didn’t even have my first name in it. This was in part an effort to avoid serial killers and in part because I know it’s easier to pronounce my middle name. So, since Boyfriend’s screen name was actually his full name because apparently he is not concerned about serial killers, I felt I should probably give him mine:

My name is Aislinn, pronounced like Ash-lynn. I’m assuming your name is Winston Poundsley because your screen name is WinstonPoundsley. (Disclaimer: not his real name. When I asked him what his code blog name should be, he answered this with concerning immediacy.)

Thinking on it, it may actually be a bit easier to explain via text than in real life. Usually, that goes something like this:

Person: Ace….Ayz….Ice… Ms. Gavin?

Me: It’s “Ash-lynn”!

Person: Oh, we have it spelled wrong.

Me: Oh, you don’t, actually! It’s Irish.

Person: Are you Irish?

Me: My dad is.

Person: Why don’t you just spell it Ashlynn?

Me: ….. Because that’s not my name.

Or trying to explain how you spell your name to someone who has only heard it spoken:

Me: It’s A- I – S – L—

Person: Wait, I think I spelled it wrong! Where do I put the h?

Me: No h! Pretend there’s an h. It’s invisible, it’s like the exact opposite of a silent letter.

As you can imagine, Starbucks – which truly is a language in and of itself, for example: one time Melanie’s cup said “Melony” as in “this punch tastes very melon-y.” – is really fun for me. I usually go by “Gavin” in an attempt to make things easier. My cup generally says “Gavan,” “Devin,” or “Alicia.” I don’t mind all the confusion, though. It comes with the territory of the Irish name. Just ask my friends Caoimhe (pron. Kweeva) aka “Cay-oh-me” and Roisin (pron. Roh-sheen) aka “Raisin.” They go by “Beth” and “Tara” at Starbucks.

As a kid, everyone knew how to pronounce my name. One of the great things about being a child is being your very own thin place: you aren’t fully blemished by how things “should” be and accept them as they are. I still remember the teachers in class mispronouncing my name and every kid in class in unison saying “ASH-LYNN. Jeez!” This is, of course, omitting the month long period of my life when I refused to respond to any name other than “Dorothy.”

Ruby slippers and munchkins notwithstanding, I did always like my name. I liked how it sounded, I liked how it was spelt, and most of all I liked what it meant. As a derivative of the name Aisling (pron. Ash-ling or -lynn or -leen), it means vision or dream. Talk about the right name for the little girl who loved (and still loves) all things fantastical and dream-like. Sometimes, I wonder if my name defines me just as much as I define it.

In the meantime, I think I’ll wait for George R. R. Martin to name a character after me. It’s bound to happen one of these days.

“How do you say ‘hangover’ in Spanish?”
“No Idea. Food and Coffee. STAT.”

This whole thing started when I decided it was a good idea to have a party a few hours before I got on a plane to Spain.

At the time, I was living in Ireland on a “study” “abroad” trip and my cousins came over for the night. Read: disaster… or as they say in Ireland, “the craic.”

We’ll just skip the particulars of that evening except to say that we drank a lot of wine. Looking back on it from The Future, it was the night that everything happened though it seemed at the time like nothing much happened at all. It was the night from which we would come to learn “we’ll never see these people again” was not a good motto. No, no, you will see people you should never see again on roof tops on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, years later in the middle of The Quays bar in Galway, and pretty much everywhere… multiple times. It was the night that some of our favorite sayings, such as “the nature times” and “just go with it, it’s funnier that way,” came into hilarious being. It was also the night before Martha and I were probably almost murdered in Madrid.

We were in bed by 9:30 p.m.

Next thing I knew, my alarm was going off at 3 a.m. and I had to get on a plane. After shoving a grand total of two outfits into my backpack, I made the one-minute trek across the lawn to Martha’s flat. I put on a kettle and prepared the breakfast of champions – tea and cookies – while she packed. I believe the conversation we had, regarding our astounding preparedness, consisted mostly of groans and grunts, but we understood.

The flight from Dublin to Madrid was a little over 2 hours. Two-plus hours of deep, deep struggle.

I had been to Spain four years earlier at the age of sixteen. On that flight the attendant was really nice to my group of friends. He gave us brownies and milk because we couldn’t sleep on the flight and, apparently, it was “shocking to meet American kids who weren’t a bunch of jerks.” I like baked goods and backhanded compliments, so I was pretty excited about Spain.

This flight was less exciting. Have you ever been hungover at 30,000 feet with TortureLights™ flickering on and off as flight attendants try to sell things to you?

RyanAir Flight Attendant (5:30 a.m.): For just forty euro, we will provide you with this mystery meat sandwich on stale bread! Are’t we great?
Me: …..
Mean Lady (5:32 a.m.): For your next flight please visit our website. It’s a miracle that you booked this flight without knowing about it! Flights as low as 2 euro 50 euro! Plastic seats may be included, we’re really not sure.
Me: I hate you.
The Devil (5:40 a.m.): Water or wine?
Me: What? WINE? First, it is not even six a.m. Second, NO. No. Wine. Ever.

My brain was screaming “Hydrate me!” at the top of it’s little brain lungs, so I wondered for a few moments what Airplane Lavatory Faucet Water tasted like. I really thought long and hard about it. Then I shelled out the ten euro for bottled water.

Upon arriving in Madrid, I stared at the signage through a thick haze of nothing as we walked two miles through the airport, aimlessly following the people in front of us. I began to panic a little.

Me: “Martha, you know what I didn’t think about when we booked this trip?”
Martha: “That the Figure-this-Airport-Out-for-Yourselves! Game would take this long?”
Me: “Nope. The fact that I DON’T SPEAK SPANISH.”

I had gotten to the point in high school where I was probably a year away from speaking fluentish. I was at that point of understanding where things started to get confusing. You know, the point where you’re ordering a sandwich somewhere and legitimately cannot remember the English word for cucumber. Two years of disuse later, I barely remembered how to say “where’s the bathroom?” (¿Dónde está el baño? BTW.) I lose language quickly. I don’t even know how to speak English that well.

Just like that, Martha became the “translator” for the trip while I stood and smiled at people (or reflexively spoke at them in English.) At that point it didn’t really matter because it was 8 a.m. and we needed sustenance. How do you say hangover in Spanish? Who knows, Food and Coffee, STAT.

The strange thing about food in Madrid when you are 20-years-old and have no money is that absolutely everything tastes like Spanish ham. Eggs? Ham. Salmon? Ham. Butter? Ham. Ham? Ham. It is really quite distressing, but we scarfed down a larger than necessary portion of food, and found our way to our hostel. It’s possible that we wandered around a private building or two before finding the hostel.

After a nap, we went out to explore the city and, more importantly, to buy Martha shoes. Because Obviously. Who remembers shoes when drunk packing? To her credit, she remembered to bring more than two outfits and underwear. When we returned to our hostel we were looking forward to spending the rest of the evening not drinking EVER and chatting with the Argentinian girls who were staying down the hall.

As we reached our floor, we noticed a man standing by the hostel door. I immediately felt uneasy and could sense Martha felt the same unease. The man by the door looked me right in the eyes – have you ever had someone look at you and the only thought in your head be “danger?” Behind us, a building resident was walking up the stairs and he must have noticed us hesitate because he took the mans attention away so that Marty could unlock the door to our part of the hostel and slam it behind us.

About an hour later, Martha had returned from her shower, and I jokingly said “I’m kind of afraid to leave our room, what if he’s here?!!” She was laughing when I opened the door and he was standing there. I slowly closed the door and turned and started laughing that uncontrollable kind of giggle that only comes when you shouldn’t be laughing. “Martha, he IS out there!”

He began banging on the doors and screaming for the “chica morena” which, I mean, was really vague seeing as every girl in that hostel had brown hair. We used our cell phones to call upstairs and try in broken Spanish to explain that there was an intruder in the hostel. Lucky for us, one of the Argentinian girls called the police after withstanding thirty minutes of the ordeal. Once the police took him away, the owners of the hostel came downstairs and yelled at all of us for calling the police. I couldn’t understand it, but I imagine the conversation went something like this:

Hostel Dude: Why would you call the police?
Argentinian Girl: Oh, butt dial. Nothing to do at all with the intruder that you were ignoring. Just kidding, sorry I’m not sorry.
Hostel Dude: We were handling it.
Martha (to me): Anddddd we’re leaving tomorrow.

So we did. And that’s the story of how we ended up running into my friend from New York in the best tapas bar in Granada drinking wine again.

This past New Year’s Eve I made a mistake. I established myself as “a hugger” – the person who gives complete strangers hugs in greeting.

The way I see it, there are 5 Levels of Stranger-ness (at Parties):

1. Randy: This Stranger is a total stranger. He probably wants to make out with you and/or your friends…and/or the lampost. Who is he? It doesn’t matter! You won’t learn his name because you’ll be calling him by his Code Name for the rest of the night. Code Names are often derived from identifiable features, including, but not limited to: “Lady Hair,” “Captain Blackbeard,” “Facial Tat” and “Chlamydia.”

2. L’Etranger: The Foreign Stranger. No one knows this person. You can’t even figure out how he got invited to the party. Frequently, he is a random French dude (always french) who your friend’s friend met six years ago on their two-week life-changing “study abroad” adventure. He doesn’t speak – presumably because he doesn’t understand Slur (drunk English) – which makes him seem mysterious. You can safely assume that he spends more time contemplating the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life than you do. This party is probably just another vapid gathering of nothings in his existential existence. He looks like maybe he killed someone. You just don’t know. But, does it even matter?

3. Future Ex-Boyfriend: They say when you know, you know…that he’s going to be your ex-boyfriend one day!

Me: And steer clear of my type? Never. Not while there are RED FLAGS EVERYWHERE! Silly.

4. Your New Best Friend: When you look into this Stranger’s eyes for the first time, a wave of acceptance that you will be friends one day washes over you. It’s Friendlove at first sight, and it is real. Often, you can just outright tell these people that you want to be friends with them, like you did in Kindergarten:

A snippet of an actual conversation I had last Saturday:

Me: I WANT TO BE FRIENDS WITH YOU.

Girl: Okay! Me too!

5. Actual Ex-Boyfriend: This is awkward. This Stranger is technically not a stranger. You actually knew them pretty well one time, but hey, the past is the past. Now, they’re relegated to a subcategory of Stranger. And you’d like to keep it that way!

Him: Hey. How are you? You look really pretty.

Me: I know. I would literally rather be in that booby-trapped room in the Temple of Doom with walls that move in to slowly crush me to death than be in this situation right now. Soooooooooo nice to see you! Hope you’re good.

6. Ozzy Osmosis: You basically know this stranger because everyone you know knows them. Sometimes, Ozzy is your friend’s sibling. Sometimes, Oz is the friend-of-friends who is living somewhere abroad (NOT to be confused with L’Etranger over there in the corner.) And sometimes, but only sometimes, is Ozzy The Unicorn Friend: that friend from college whose whereabouts are generally unknown; you’ve been told before that s/he only emerges a few times a year, if s/he even has cell phone coverage again. The point is: you know who they are and they know who you are. You know they know who you are, and they know that you know that they know that you know… who they are.

And so it was, that in the hours before 2014, a rather delicate situation arose: I was faced with meeting and greeting an Ozzy and a Randy at the same time.

Greetings are the worst part of meeting Strangers. They are a hotbed for awkwardness because they require you to read the comfort level and appropriateness of the situation. Usually, I am quite good at this, but occasionally, I slip up.

ASIDE: It is for this reason that my dream of being on a talk show is also my greatest fear. I know that when that day inevitably comes and David Letterman greets me on stage, I will go in for a hug while he goes in for a handshake. I will probably go to kiss the same cheek he kisses, too, causing both of us to do the awkward chicken-bob head dodge to avoid kissing each other on the lips. I’ve thought about this moment a lot.

On this night, the part of Ozzy was played by the brother of two of my friends. I had been hearing about him for two years and he had never surfaced. I was beginning to doubt his existence. Naturally, upon greeting him, I gave him a hug and said “So nice to finally meet you!” (or some shit like that.) I don’t think he knew who I was. Boys don’t pay attention to anything, though, so whatever!

Unfortunately, I chose to hug him almost immediately before I stuck my hand out to greet Randy, who stood waiting next to him. I watched, with awkward horror, as Randy’s look of expectancy turned to Kind-Of-Sad-Confusion.

Randy looked down at my hand.

I smiled.

He opened his arms and stared at me.

I hesitated. My extended hand involuntarily retracting.

“What? No hug for me?” Randy said.

So, I gave in. I did. I hugged him and I thought:

I am the most awkward person on the planet! I am so mean for not going to hug you right away!

But not really, because hugging you is so awkward because I REALLY DO NOT KNOW YOU!

Who are you?

Why do you have the same haircut as Jennifer Lawrence?

Did you just say your name? I wasn’t listening. I’m going to call you Lady Hair for the rest of the night.

I’ve always liked bowties. Bowties can look dapper, sleek, hipster, or just plain silly. I prefer silly. I picked my neurologist based almost entirely on the fact that he wore a bowtie. He had an “emergency bowtie” on his book shelf. I thought this was weird… in a good way. I was pretty sure he, like, knew things, too.

I think his bowtie had a sperm design on it. I’m really not sure because I couldn’t ask him. You can’t just ask someone if their tie has multicolored sperm on it. That could go one of two ways:

Dr. Brainy: Um… no? These are just squiggly lines with pointy oval shapes on one end.

Me: Okay, sorry, but it looks like you have multicolored sperm on your tie.

Dr. Brainy: Oh. Sad.😦 I’ll probably hate you forever now.

or

Me: ….does your bowtie have a sperm design on it?

Dr. Brainy: It does!

Me: Okay, yes, carry on.

I spent the majority of that appointment staring at his neck like a serial killer.

I guess I should explain the neurology thing: I have malfunctioned.

On November 23rd, while I was watching Doctor Who and his bowtie save the universe with my friends, I suddenly smudged my glasses. I couldn’t get the smudge to go away, even though I’d cleaned them. When I got home, I went to change into my contacts to find that I hadn’t smudged my glasses at all.

The entirety of the central vision in my left eye was gone. In it’s place was a fuzzy, grayed-out almost-circle, like when someone takes a picture with a bright flash and there is a spot where you cannot see. I completely panicked, as you do when you suddenly go partially blind. I can’t see. (Insert alarm bell noises here.) BAD. VERY BAD.

And so began the two weeks of my life that I existed in a near constant state of fight or flight. That night, I chose flight. I decided that it would go away and went to a party. I stand by that decision. It didn’t go away.

Since then, I’ve chosen fight. Two MRIs, four doctors, five botched spinal tap attempts (and one blood patch,) twenty seven needles, and five thousand milliliters of steroids later, I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Essentially, what that means is that my immune system has gone rogue and occasionally attacks things it should really not attack. Asshole. In my case, it appears to be rather fond of my optic nerve (which has since been kind enough to stop being inflamed, allowing my vision to return to normal.)

I debated writing this post for a long time. I have this really intense fear of people thinking I’m playing the sympathy card for attention, of being defined by it in the eyes of others, or of making people upset. Really, I would prefer if everyone would just NOT act like anything because I have to live another sixty years with this. I can go to work, I can get married, I can have babies, I just might sometimes have a little trouble seeing out of one of my eyes (or some other symptom but we’ll cross that bridge when and if we come to it.)

I allowed myself a one day pity party. Clearly, the list of things I wound up stressing about did not include actually having an autoimmune disorder. I didn’t even make it through the day. Feeling sorry for myself was so incredibly boring. Plus, I was on steroids and much more interested in yelling at everyone. Roid rage is real.

The way I see it, things can always be worse, way worse. I don’t see being diagnosed with M.S. as some terrible, horrible, no good, very bad thing that’s happened to me. Now I know. I know why I get tired easily. I know that if I ever lose my sight again, I don’t need to be scared. I will have medicine that tells my immune system to calm the hell down. And at the end of the day, I know that I’m going to be okay. So many people don’t have that security.

This is probably the last post I’ll write explicitly about M.S., for the reasons I state above. But now, perhaps my life and attitude towards it may make a little more sense — even if it was just a post for me to gather my thoughts and make a little more sense to myself.

My Pop always said “Live the shit out of life.” That’s the plan. I always liked adventures and bowties anyway.

The following stories are true. Any resemblance to real people is not at all coincidental. It’s definitely about exactly who you think it’s about. Names have been changed to code names that are not subtle.

I get writer’s block a lot. Mostly, I think because I haven’t ever taken writing “seriously.” I have always done it to make people laugh or to gather my thoughts in a way that actually makes sense. “Seriously,” it was always something I did when I had a paper due that morning the next morning. I wasn’t the best of students. Not that I wasn’t smart. I wasn’t lazy either. I was bored.

I went to Catholic high school. We wore kilts made of Teflon and rolled the waist hems to make them shorter. I stopped rolling mine around the time I realized that if I didn’t, I only had to shave my legs up to my knees. We went to mass once a month in our gym, and as a member of concert choir, I was frequently tasked with set up. No one can set up a row of folding chairs as quickly and neatly as I can. It’s a life skill.

In high school, I had a solid group of friends for the first time. I’m still friends with some of them. Actually, my brother married one of them. I felt like a grown up and had grown up things to worry about, such as (ranked in no particular order):

Getting a part in the musical. I played Liesl in the Sound of Music before my dreams of being on Broadway were crushed forever by a certain university in New York — LOOK AT ME NOW, BITCHES!…. wait….

Boys. A constant source of anxiety. As if any of them were even remotely acceptable dating material.

Physics class. Totally got an A.

Everything. Still an issue.

Not getting into a good college. I did. I graduated, too.

My dog getting old. He died… as dogs are wont to do.

Web MD. Also still an issue.

Being in the same grade as my big brother…

I once had a teacher say to me, “if you were more like your brother, you’d have done better in this class.” I’m serious. I am very close with my siblings. You have never met three more different people. The people who loved us never made us feel like we were being compared. But complete strangers did. I cried about it in the car ride home that day. My brother said that it was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard and reminded me why I really didn’t do well in the class. I didn’t do well because it was religion class and the teacher and I disagreed on some fundamental issues, like how not to be a horrible person.

Religion teachers and I have a history. My freshman year, a different teacher, Mr. Matrix, threw a coffee mug at my head. Let me take you back with me a bit:

Mr. Matrix: If I wasn’t Catholic, I would be Atheist.

Baby Aislinn (thinking):Extremism. Love it.

——

Mr. Matrix: Kissing before marriage is wrong.

Baby Aislinn (thinking): Oh. My. God. Yessss. This will be hilarious.

——

Mr. Matrix: Women are the cause of original sin. There is a long, intricate ‘thread’ about this in the Catholic Latin Chat room that I met my teenage girlfriend on. I wear her hair-elastic around my wrist. We’re getting married in the fall.

Baby Aislinn (thinking): Do you make it rub the lotion on its skin whenever it’s told, too?

——

Mr. Matrix: When a woman sits on a man’s lap, she is emulating the devil putting man through temptation.

Baby Aislinn (mutters aloud): Well, no.

Mr. Matrix: Excuse me?

Baby Aislinn (realizing I said this out loud, figuring there was no going back): That is the most misogynistic comment. And you said it in a classroom made up almost entirely of teenage girls.

Besides getting detention a few times, high school was fairly uneventful for me. I never got asked on a date; wasn’t a star athlete, the valedictorian, or the prom queen; I didn’t even get a superlative! I’m sure those things upset me then, but I don’t even remember now. It didn’t really matter to me. I had friends who loved me. In the grand scheme of things, high school is purgatory (oh my! religious references galore!) It is where you wait.

Of the memories I have from high school, the majority of them are good. I actually keep in touch with a number of the teachers I had and liked. We’re Facebook friends! But the memories that I cherish the most?

Setting up folding chairs with my friends and crazy religion teachers. And that thing with the crickets, but that’s another story for another time.